I have never been particularly good with directions, which is how I found myself standing in a supermarket car park in Orebro convinced my holiday cottage was somewhere behind the frozen veg aisle. The sat nav had given up on me three roundabouts ago, and my phone was treating me to that special Swedish silence that means you have definitely taken a wrong turn somewhere near Lake Hjalmaren.

The journey from Stockholm had been pleasant enough, all pine forests and red wooden houses flashing past the train window. I had rather smugly decided to walk from the station to my NOVASOL cottage, figuring a bit of fresh air would do me good after four hours of nodding off against a stranger's shoulder. Twenty minutes later, I was asking a very patient woman where exactly I had gone wrong. She pointed me back toward the old town with a smile that suggested she had done this before for other hapless tourists.

The cottage itself, when I finally located it, turned out to be one of those charming Swedish affairs tucked down a quiet lane, all pale wood and sensible Scandinavian practicality. I dumped my bags with the relief of a man who had just navigated his own personal marathon and set out to explore with absolutely no plan whatsoever. This, I have learned, is when the best things happen.

Wandering without purpose through Orebro's older quarters, I stumbled upon a tiny courtyard garden behind what I thought was a dead end. An elderly gentleman was tending tomatoes in a greenhouse that looked older than both of us combined. He waved me through without a word of English, and we spent ten minutes discussing vegetables through the universal language of enthusiastic pointing. I left with a handful of currants and the distinct feeling that I had accidentally gatecrashed someone's peaceful afternoon.

The real discovery came the following morning. Intending to find the castle, which is rather difficult to miss being rather large and central, I took what I believed to be a shortcut through a park. The path dwindled to nothing, then reappeared running alongside a stream I could not locate on any map. Following it on pure instinct, I emerged at a small wooden jetty where a couple of locals were swimming with an enthusiasm that suggested the water was far warmer than it looked. They invited me for coffee from a thermos, and we sat there watching dragonflies until my fingers went numb from the mug.

That became the pattern of my stay. Deliberately losing myself in the residential streets west of the centre, I found a bakery operating from someone's front room, identifiable only by the handwritten sign and the smell of cardamom. I discovered a second-hand bookshop where the owner had arranged his stock by the colour of the spines rather than subject, which made browsing feel like archaeological excavation. Each wrong turn delivered something the guidebooks had never mentioned, though perhaps that was the point.

On my final evening, I found myself back at that supermarket car park, though this time by design. I had worked out that the little path behind it led to a viewpoint I had spotted from my accidental wanderings. Standing there with a mediocre sandwich and an excellent sense of contentment, I watched the light fade over the rooftops and reflected on how my complete inability to follow instructions had somehow delivered the holiday I had not known I needed. Some people plan meticulously and see exactly what they intended. I get lost in Swedish car parks and accidentally collect moments that feel genuinely mine. I know which I prefer, and I suspect I will be getting lost again very soon.